The Way Things Could Be (and Should Be?) Part 1

As I’m sitting at my computer musing about all the subjects I could write about that would enlighten women, I keep coming back to one theme in my mind. In order to combat any problem, any ignorance, any error, there must first be knowledge that there is indeed an error. That is what women in the United States need to know. There has been a grievous mistake made, and we must first recognize that fact to be able to combat it with truth. That thought, understandably, opens up a whole spectrum of misgivings. “What if women have gone so far in the wrong direction, that they can no longer see the truth for what it is, because there is security in staying the same, even when the same is the enemy?”

I let my mind play over all the things I have come to know in the past years, all the statistics and studies and research that have strengthened my position, and I conclude that those are good for doing just that. They strengthen and solidify, but the cold hard numbers are not usually the path a woman follows to change. Make no mistake, she wants them, and she expects to use them to back an opinion, but from my experience, at first an opinion is born, much like a baby, from the depths of feeling. If this is true, I can conclude that the masses of women who make the decisions they make about birth do so based on a genuine belief that they are doing the best thing for their baby, or a genuine fear that childbirth and all its discomfort is too big for them to understand or tackle without the huge medical community they have come to trust to take care of them. I can throw the “Did you know…” quotes around all day long, but in the end all that will matter is that I am asking them to step out on a limb and turn their back on all they have been taught is “normal” while they are in the midst of great change and uncertainty.

I must begin, then, with pointing to the cracks in the foundation of our belief system about birth. I must begin at the beginning, where the error began to grow and be nurtured in our country, and I must show examples of other places that have not been swayed by the lies that form our western understanding of the amazingly complex and yet so simple process of childbirth. This I cannot hope to do in one post.

First, I must begin with the mom who will not take responsibility for her health and that of her child. Why start here? Does this not seem like an attack on my audience? On the contrary, pointing out every flaw of our current system will leave you no better off if you first do not begin to realize that you are ultimately responsible for making decisions for yourself and your child. No one is better qualified to consider and decide the path you will choose than you are. I have been speaking with women about childbirth a lot recently, and a couple of times, I have encountered an attitude that frightens me. There is a tendency among women to surrender complete control to a system that will handle them like they are ill and in need of treatment and intervention, when in fact, they are not even sick. I hear statements like these:

“I don’t handle pain well, so I want every drug they will give me so I don’t have to feel 
anything.”

“I don’t want the surprise of not knowing when I am actually in labor, so I am asking my doctor to induce me so I can know when this baby is coming.”

                I remember feeling this same way. In my late teens, I begin to consider that fact that someday I would want children. I begin to think about the process, and draw from the knowledge I had on the subject to make decisions about what childbirth would look like for me. My pictures all came from our culture. I had mental images of women screaming at their bewildered husbands, and I had been privy to a few conversations about birth women had had in my presence. I knew two things about myself and the way the culture had taught me to view birth. I did not like, nor did I desire to experience pain, and breastfeeding was weird, hippie, and gross, and I didn’t want to be any of those things. In my childish mind, I formed a plan. I would have every drug available to man to ease or eliminate my pain, and I would never consider breastfeeding, because in my mind, everything about giving a baby a bottle was beautiful and normal. I was basing some very important decisions on some very shaky and untrue presumptions sold to me by sitcoms and companies trying to sell an image to sell a product. By God’s grace, when I found out I was pregnant with my first child, I realized the great responsibility I had to consider the choices I made in light of the fact that they would now affect someone else and not just me.  

                Every woman has this same responsibility. The decisions you make about childbirth need to be made with the weight of your responsibility for your health and that of the child you are carrying. Every drug and intervention you allow will have some impact on you and that child. If your attitude is to allow others to make those decisions for you, then you are doing yourself and your baby a great disservice. I think for many women, knowing where to start is the block that keeps them from knowing how to make these decisions. There are few places to learn and be able to understand about all of these interventions, and knowing who to believe or which route to take can be daunting. Thankfully, there is a growing culture of information available to women to help them make informed decisions, so that next time you sign an informed consent to be treated, you will understand what you are signing and why. My goal in later posts will be to make some of that information available to you, along with good sources, studies, and stories that will help you to begin to see pregnancy and childbirth for what they really are, not a curse of pain and trouble, but a blessing of stretching and growing and character development like no other.

Start out with this thought provoking link I found some time ago.
http://erinmidwife.com/2011/03/31/if-i-were-at-home-i-would-have-died/

Women Serving Women

Welcome to the first post in our Blessing God’s Way blog. We hope you will follow this blog and share with friends so a wider community can get to know the purpose of this ministry. I thought it appropriate to use this first post to share a little about that purpose and our heart, so that you might become more familiar with who we are.  Blessing God’s Way is based in Strasburg, Virginia, and is dedicated to ministering to and educating women in all cycles of their lives, which we like to break down into three distinct parts: maidenhood, maternity, and mentoring. We offer classes, seminars, and midwifery services under that umbrella. For this post, I’ll focus on the education aspect of the ministry, so you can get a feel for why we believe this is crucially important in this day and age.

The Bible says in Psalm 139:14 that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made”. God carefully designed and orchestrated the workings of the human body to accomplish certain things to his glory, and yet on the subjects of menstruation and childbirth, the Christian community is mostly silent, and willing to let the culture fill in the blanks we are leaving in our own understanding by not seeking out God’s truth. We have gone so far in that direction, that some may even be surprised to hear God has an opinion at all about those things. It is our desire to help educate girls and women about the proper working of their body, so that they can recognize dangers many consider cultural norms, which in fact may be a very bad idea from a health and wellness standpoint. By teaching someone to recognize and walk in the truth, we hope to empower them to make positive choices that will be a blessing not only to them, but to generations of women who come after them.  How do we accomplish that?

We recognize first of all that God has given the training of the children to their parents to accomplish, and that for this reason, the best teacher and mentor for a young girl is her own mother. Unfortunately, many women with girls who are ready to talk about the changes in their body and menstruation find themselves woefully unprepared to even have a simple talk without floods of embarrassment or tons of blank spaces in their own understanding. Our desire is to reach these women, and come alongside them by offering a well-thought-out course in a casual and comfortable atmosphere where they are given the tools, alongside their young daughter, to have a beneficial discussion about this new phase of her life. This course is titled “Maidens By His Design” and we have seen an outpouring of women who are so thankful for the education they have received and in turn been able to pass on to their daughters. For women who prefer to go through the material themselves at home with their daughters in a completely private setting, we also make available a mother/daughter kit for them to use.

As women move from childhood into adulthood, there is no sudden magical revelation about how the body works to conceive, grow, and deliver a baby. Yet, our culture approaches this subject as if there is that revelation, or as if it is entirely unimportant that a woman have an understanding of this cycle in her life. American women move through the system for the most part, having chosen a caregiver from friends recommendation or advertising, having five to ten minute appointments with that caregiver during which they are given little or no information about the “whys” of the care they are receiving, and then toward the end, expected to make few decisions for themselves about their labor and delivery, because, in fact, they do not have the information and education to make informed decisions, nor have they been encouraged to seek out that information during the course of their pregnancy. Our heart is to offer these women unimpeded access to the “whys” they are missing in their care, and spark in them the interest to be able to make good decisions for themselves and their baby. We offer childbirth classes and midwifery care to that end, because we do believe that in the fully medicalized culture of the United States, a woman deserves a full range of choices and education, so that she can be her own best caregiver, becoming responsible for her own body and her own choices, and reaching the end of pregnancy completely prepared for the hard work of labor that lies ahead. Instead of surrendering herself to the care of others with little or no understanding of the ins and outs of her care, she can and should be at the center of the process, driving the decision making and educating herself about the nuances of how God designed her body to accomplish this task. This builds a trust in God that will serve her far more than any tool or intervention when she finds herself in the midst of the hard work of labor.

We hope to help remove the scales from the eyes of many generations of women who desire to see God’s truth touch all corners of their lives. We hope you’ll join us on the journey!